No Man is an Island: The “Migrant Crisis”, Coming Soon to a Country Near You

If Silvio Berlusconi’s party is victorious next month, the media magnate has declared that the homogeneous Mediterranean island nation of Malta “will have to share in the burden” of accepting migrants again—an ongoing point of serious contention between Malta and Italy to the north—presumably because a nation that is 95% percent Maltese is an intolerable injustice in this multi-cultural era. At Europe’s other extremity, the Icelandic government has used the excuse of a “labor shortage” to upset the country’s fragile demographic balance; at 91% Icelandic, the indigenous share of the population, at the present rate, is expected to decline another six percentage points by 2030. These are not nations with large populations; at 450,000 and 350,000, respectively, Maltese and Icelandic society could be dramatically transformed by a relatively small number of migrants (remember, only between 2.5-3% of these migrants meet the United Nations definition of a refugee).

Professor John O’Hagan of Trinity College Dublin is unconcerned with wholesale demographic transformation, stating emphatically, “Clearly [Ireland] could accommodate say a twofold increase in population.” This would be to the order of about five million immigrants arriving in the Emerald Isle. To the south, politician Luigi Arru wants to flood the Italian island of Sardinia with migrants in order to “re-populate” it, despite stiff local opposition to expanding the Algeria-to-Sardinia pipeline. Both men share “concern” for their graying populations, though why exactly a managed decrease in population is so abhorrent as opposed to turning Sardinia into Algeria, or Sicily into Nigeria, or Bute in Scotland into Syria is never articulated. Lampedusa, Lesbos, Kos—all are becoming unrecognizable, a product of governmental re-settlement, open-borders NGOs, and opportunistic human traffickers jamming as much bio-mass as possible into the space available. Does no one ever stop to ask why?

It seems even having the benefit of geographic separation cannot protect a nation from the contagion of multi-culturalism. Europe stood by while Turkey took over the northern half of Cyprus and razed all of its churches, and it now does the same as ever-increasing numbers of migrants flood its shores and Turkey maintains its territorial aggression. Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides condemned the United Nations as “Pontius Pilate” in response to their lack of response to the Turkish blockade, and singled out Britain in particular for their inaction. Meanwhile, as European Parliament member Eleni Theocharous sounds the alarm about the economic and social fallout of the “dramatic increase” of migrants swamping the island, Juncker and company’s ears remain deaf.

Perhaps Iceland would be willing to take some of the influx off of the Cypriots’ hands. Multi-culturalism is as much a thought contagion as anything. In defiance of all empirical evidence that large-scale immigration from dysfunctional societies with little to no respect for Western values, human rights, and law and order does not benefit the receiving country, attitudes in many European and Euro-Diaspora nations remain very warm to the prospect of population replacement. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, out of the 138 countries surveyed, Iceland was the world’s most immigrant-friendly using the Migrant Acceptance Index with a score of 8.26 out of 9, narrowly “beating” New Zealand’s 8.25. Other Western nations in the top ten were Australia with a 7.98 score, Sweden with 7.92, and Ireland with 7.74. The least-welcoming, which is encouraging for our cause, included Macedonia, Montenegro, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Croatia.

The European Union will be damned if its member states don’t start accepting migrant quotas, however; the Visegrad Group (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) have been threatened with legal action and economic sanctions for refusing their “fair share” of migrants. The Court of Justice has described its quotas as “necessary,” whereas the V4 correctly recognize that to capitulate to these quotas is both to surrender their right to self-determination and national sovereignty and would jeopardize the safety of their citizens, not to mention cause the inevitable erosion of the unique cultural and social fabric of their nations. New York Times writers Steven Erlanger and Marc Santora, however, clutch their pearls at the notion that a European nation has a right to pursue its own interests without inviting in the entire Third World, especially if that nation is explicitly Christian (if it were Israel the narrative would surely be a little different): “Poland’s Nationalism Threatens Europe’s Values, and Cohesion.”

To quote Michal Baranowski, director of Warsaw’s German Marshall Fund office: “It’s ‘yes’ to Europe, but what Europe?” Will it be the fierce defense of their national and ethnic identity by the V4, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and others, or the limp-wristed childlessness governing the UK, Germany, Luxembourg, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden? Says Slawomir Debski of the Polish Institute of International Affairs, “The history is part of our identity, which people in other parts of the world don’t understand. What is it to be a Pole? We are the nation that survived World War II, and were the victims of both totalitarian systems.”

The new totalitarian system in Europe is a variation on a theme. We’ve seen this game played before. In 1945, the percentage of the Estonian population that was ethnically Estonian was 97%. In 1959, it was 74.6%. In 1989 it was 61.5%, all courtesy of the Soviet Union’s mass deportations and executions of native Estonians, and mass importation of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, in order to dissolve the country’s national character and identity, and to erase any sense of an “Estonia” that was anything more than just an administrative district in the Soviet Union. Deprived of positions of seniority in the soviet and subject to “reforms” to the education system biased against the Estonian language and their national history, Estonians, like Latvians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and so many other ethnicities in the USSR, were ear-marked for oblivion to be replaced by the crushing uniformity of the New Soviet Man. The parallels with the modern era are truly terrifying, but to voice any kind of opposition to the modern Bolshevik population replacement of Europe…well, that would be racist.

John Q. Publius writes for Defend Europa and runs the blog The Anatomically Correct Banana.